[d3v0 lifeblog]

--For the moment I'm retiring the fishbowl from my right hand links. I'm sure Fishy will want to do creative and expressing writing there in the future; I like reading things from people with Mathematical brains :)

New blog is the baby bump, a friends wife's baby blog. Haven't read it much, but I expect I'll find it funny :)

Changed blog is the dreamstress, who started blogging about her part time seamstress historical recreation, but is now doing that full time. Worth a read of you like dresses, history, art or fabric.

--I've said that online dating tries to force wonderful and complex whole people into little boxes and that it felt like I didn't fit well into little boxes. This guys says a lot more and has done the research to prove it.

When I replaced my hot water cylinder at the end of its usable life I went for a partly solar powered one. The cylinder in the house was installed in 1976 and was due to expire irreparably at any time.

I replace this with a Chromagen hot water cylinder which is from Israel and is fancy and expensive. It has solar panels on the roof that heat up liquid which gets pumped to the cylinder to a heat exchanger that heats up the water. This avoids impurities in tap water clogging up the solar panels.

The cylinder has a thermostat in it that controls heating, and there is some computer control of these systems.

The installer of this system was Negawatt who do 'green' type work on water heating, home heating and insulation. The guy a dealt with was competent but I didn't love him because I didn't get good engineering vibes from the guy.

Their product recommendation has been sound and the installation was good, you can find them here.

For my regular plumbing work I have been using a guy called Karen (pronounced Kareen) who is an engineer and gives me good engineering vibes. He has a team of people who do plumbing, roofing, kitchens and bathrooms.

Karen did great work on renovations in my water closet, laundry and kitchen so when my hot water stopped working I called him to get him to fix it. He has also installed Chromagen hot water systems in the past.

If your hot water stops working you shouldn't get upset because the element and thermostat components only work for so many years and then need replacing. If your shoes wear out then you can buy new ones yourself, but you need a plumber to fix your hot water system.

He looked at it and found the thermostat needed replacing. Simple diagnosis.

The solar part is also broken through a simpler problem, a pipe connecting the Solar panel to the water cylinder has become disconnected.

With hot water systems what you hope you are buying is both the original parts and the supply chain to provide replacement parts for the life of the system. This might be 30 years of replacement parts, possibly.

A complexity of solar hot water systems is that this is a relatively new market and the technology is rapidly evolving. A further problem is that a relatively small number of each manufacturers cylinder type is installed in New Zealand as we are not a populous country.

I knew this would be a factor when I bought my hot water cylinder because this is equivalent to a set of problems you run into with software.

Where it gets tricky for me is in finding a replacement part. The New Zealand supplier cannot supply an exact replacement part.

I speculate that it might be possible that they can get one from Israel where they are manufactured via sea freight and that they don't wish to engage in this as a supply strategy and haven't told me about it.

So the parts supplier has supplied a part that they believe a repair can be made with that is more locally available than the parts from Israel.

Now it gets tricky. The original part was an arm length thing that sat in the hot water system. The new part is a fist sized thing that sits on top of the tank.

The old part was manufactured by Chromagen who made the cylinder, but the new part is not.

This new part looks through the outside of the cylinder, through the insulation and into the tank to find out he temperature of the water.

The old part was in the water and took a more direct reading.

A pertinent questions is whether Chromagen in Israel consider this a good part substitution. I haven't got an answer to that yet.

My plumber Karen isn't comfortable with replacing the old part with the new part, because he doesn't know that it is compatible with the computer of the hot water cylinder. This is reasonable given that the two parts use different measurement mechanisms.

The imported and distributor are Infinergy who you can find here. I've had some contact about what to do next but I'm hoping their guy in Wellington to make this repair instead of my plumber.

I will also contact the original installer to see if they do repairs. A second option. They are located in Petone also, I'll drop by today and have a chat to them.

A third option is for Chromagen in Israel to say that they approve this part substitution because this would convince Karen that the work is sensible to do.

A forth option is to flog my dead system on Trademe, and install another.